N.S. woman goes viral on TikTok after combining passions for cleaning, mental health

A Dartmouth, N.S., woman who has combined her passions for cleaning and mental health to create videos for TikTok has gone viral — gaining more than three million followers on the platform.

Brogan Chambers, a psychology student at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, creates short videos about cleaning and organization with an emphasis on overcoming barriers related to mental health.

In just a year and a half, her TikTok — called Not the Worst Cleaner — has attracted 3.2 million followers, and her videos have received 32.8 million likes. One of her latest videos, which features her cleaning out an overstuffed fridge filled with expired food, has nearly 10 million views.

"There's so many different reasons why they watch. Some just like the motivation — the motivational factor that comes from watching other people clean," Chambers told CBC Radio's Information Morning Nova Scotia on Friday.

"But I think a lot of people don't realize that huge correlation between cleaning and mental health. It's not something that's researched or discussed enough."

Listen to the full interview here:

Her conversation with host Portia Clark has been condensed and edited for clarity and length.

How did you get into this, teaching people how to clean and doing that on TikTok?

Honestly, TikTok was the happiest accident. I never meant to become a big creator. I purchased my first home a few years ago and got really into cleaning and organizing, and as someone who has ADHD, I knew if I wanted to keep up with the kids and the cleaning, I had to develop some kind of solid system and routine, so after creating a cleaning schedule that my friends went nuts over, I decided on a whim to post a video on TikTok. 

It ended up going super viral after the first video and I just kind of kept rolling with it. People seem to really love it so after time went on, I tied my psychology background into my videos and really wanted to highlight the correlation between the cleaning and the mental health and just raise awareness on the subject.

You have more than three million followers on TikTok — people who watch your cleaning videos. What do they tell you about why they watch?

There's so many different reasons why they watch. Some just like the motivation, the motivational factor that comes from watching other people clean, but I think a lot of people don't realize that huge correlation between cleaning and mental health. It's not something that's researched or discussed enough.

When you live in a messy, cluttered space, it can actually worsen depression and anxiety and even cause our brains to subconsciously trigger a low flight-or-fight response, so something so simple can cause physical and emotional distress without even realizing, and again, if you're neurodivergent like me, like if you have ADHD, it's so easy to get trapped in a pattern of that hyperfixation where you have so much motivation in the beginning to do something, but then you end up [hitting] that sensory overload where you lose steam halfway and you end up in a paralysis mode and that in turn leads to the procrastination, where you either would rather watch TV or start another project or ignore what you were originally working on, which leads to that cyclic pattern of the guilt and then you quit, and then you start the hyper fixation again. 

It's really discouraging for anybody to be stuck in a pattern like that, especially if you have depression and anxiety because it can turn into irritability, tension, stress, poor sleep. People in these situations have actually, in studies, been shown to have higher cortisol levels, which is the stress hormone, so it's just this never-ending cycle of your poor mental health causing a mess and then the mess internally causing worsening mental health. 

What advice do you give people for attacking a mess that seems insurmountable?

It can seem so overwhelming, especially if cleaning gets put on a back burner for a while and it ends up being an overwhelming amount of mess and in your brain you're thinking, "Oh, I have to do it all at once" … so my best advice is to break it down into the smallest steps possible. 

My cleaning schedule I love because every single day I'm cleaning a different area of my house. So it's not all at once. It's not all of the rooms in one day. Each day is a different room where I spend 20 minutes on it and it makes it easier to tackle the whole space. 

Cleaning is — no matter what, whether you like it or not — it's a part of your daily life, so you end up leading to that space where you're like, I don't want to do it anymore. You resent it. You have those negative feelings towards it and again, if you experience any kind of mental health issue, that's just going to make it worse, so definitely breaking it down into those small, achievable goals. 

You've seen that first-hand. You've started offering free house cleaning to people in need. Tell us a bit about that first project. 

I started doing the free cleanings because after my TikTok, I had so many people reach out with heartbreaking stories so I really wanted to help people locally who live in unlivable situations due to poor mental or physical health and give them that fresh start by making their place livable again. 

So I posted in a couple of my local community groups, just offering my free assistance to come in free of charge to make their space less overwhelming for them and livable. 

I did one last weekend, which is on my page now, of a single woman living locally with three kids and she reached out. She had obviously mental health issues. Some things happened in her life and over the years, it added up astronomically, so when we went in on the weekend, I brought a friend of mine with me because it was going to be a really big job. 

We spent nine hours on this house and took out 30 industrial-sized garbage bags of garbage out of this home. 

You literally were pulling years-old food out of the fridge, but what struck me was there was no judgment as you were going through that fridge. 

Absolutely no judgment. I mean, I struggle with mental health myself and I grew up with a single mom, so I know how tough things can get sometimes. I will never judge anybody for anything like that. One of the things that I preach on my page is that your worth is never dependent on the cleanliness of your home. 

What your home looks like does not have any effect on who you are as a person and I think people forget that sometimes, and they base their self-worth on little things like that. 

What was the reaction from this family when they saw how you transformed their kitchen? 

It was incredible. She said that I honestly gave her a new lease on life and that I saved her life, and I actually got a video of her kids walking in and they cried so it was heart-wrenching.